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Or how I learned language

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Aslan, the talking lion, was my favorite character in all 7 books of the Chronicles of Narnia. My parents, a couple of hippies, read aloud many children's classics, exposing me to the English language before I could read for myself.

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Baby Factor was the name written on my birth certificate until my dad eventually thought of the name "Tia" a few weeks later. Even as an infant, I was already listening to and absorbing the phonology of my parents.

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I was a first rate copy cat! At the age of 3 I would run to my parent's bed early in the morning and yell at the top of my lungs, " Get up! Stand up! Stand-up for your rights!", lines from a Bob Marley song my parents often played.

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Like all children, I was curious about the world and the people around me. I talked a lot and asked a lot of questions. Luckily, my mom and dad both loved to talk too and were always up for a discussion.

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My education outside home began when I started preschool at the age of 4. I learned that the same language sounds different when spoken by different people, like my friends and teachers I met at school.

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I loved going to my grandparent's house because I'd get to watch TV! One of my favorite shows was Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. I loved how Fred Rogers spoke very slowly and carefully. I could understand every word he said, what it meant, and how it made me feel inside.

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I felt safe and happy when my mom would leave me at Gram Jean's house. Gram was an editor for a scientific journal and had an expansive and colorful  vocabulary. She would describe things as ghastly or call an event a fiasco. While I hadn't heard those words before, I would use the context clues to decipher the meaning of those 10-cent words.

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My Grandpa Harry was a quiet man. He immigrated from Latvia and was already very old when I was just a little kid. When he spoke, it was with a Yiddish accent. I felt embarrassed when I couldn't understand him because of the differences in phonology between English and Yiddish. He pronounced his Ws like Vs and his Vs like Ws.

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My mom was a musician who said her voice was her best instrument. It was powerful, loud and emotive. She mostly spoke slowly and clearly and with just a small shift in her inflection, she could express complex meaning and emotion, sympathy, frustration, humor or exhaustion.

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The first book I read by myself was Just for You by Mercer Mayer. I loved the illustrations which featured the misadventures of Little Critter who tried his best to do things to help his mom out but always messed things up. I sounded the words out over and over again, developing my morphological awareness.

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Kermit the Frog from Sesame Street was one of the best teachers a kid could have. He taught me the ABCs song, the sounds and shapes of the 26 letters in the English alphabet, which became the basis for reading later. Kermit was patient, kind, humble, funny and even vulnerable at times –all the best traits a teacher could have!

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As an anglophone, I held a great deal of privilege. I never even considered that the language we spoke at home was also the dominant language in the larger society in which we lived. Being a native English speaker made succeeding in school less challenging for me than for my best friend Lisa, who grew-up speaking Spanish at home. Sometimes I'd taunt Lisa for pronouncing words "wrong" or correct her with irritation.

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One of my favorite things to do with my two younger siblings was to play the card matching game called Memory. Looking at simple pictures, saying the words for each one aloud, sometimes riffing on the images to create whole sentences or stories, the game was a teaching tool for me; a foundational experience in dynamic social practice and discourse among my siblings and I.

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Before I was even a year old, I began making prelingual sounds like da and ma. These sounds communicated my needs and brought me some level of satisfaction. Making them showed me that language is powerful. To use my voice to form sounds that mimicked what I was hearing, could affect the immediate world around me.

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My dad is a person with strong opinions. He communicated his ideas about many things with a high level of confidence, even arrogance at times. Through this, he introduced me to pragmatics, helping me see that language is used to express opinions and has an effect on the other participants in a dialogue. It's not just what is said, but how it's said that conveys the meaning.

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When I was in elementary school I was referred to a speech therapist who I would work with each week. Somehow I wasn't  pronouncing th or s sounds correctly. I remember feeling pretty frustrated and a little embarrassed practicing then listening as the therapist enunciated the sounds clearly over and over again.

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I liked to talk in school--a lot! And in my midwestern public school (in the 1980's), sociocultural perspectives on language learning weren't really part of the pedagogical model of the time. My teachers demanded quiet classrooms and used more punitive methods of classroom management. After a particularly talkative class session, I was made to write "Silence is golden." in neat cursive 50 times before being released home for the day. Those words are still etched in my mind.

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Repetition was an important linguistic tradition for my siblings and I. Someone would say something weird or funny and then everyone else would repeat it over and over again. It would generally get funnier and funnier as it moved further from the original source. Chanting duty alert in a robot voice is one phrase I remember saying way too many times as we ran around the house in a frenzy.

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Even before I could read, one of my favorite books was Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever, as well as all his other Busytown books. Reading them around age 5 helped broaden my growing lexicon significantly, connecting the way the written word looked with the picture it was paired with.

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While I learned to use language in a particular way at home with my family, my teachers taught me how to learn, use, and understand language within an academic setting. Though I wasn't aware of the double linguistic learning taking place, we were being taught both content objectives and language objectives.

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I lived outside Chicago in a suburb called Des Plaines. But for some reason the part we lived in was technically an "unincorporated" part of town. This meant there often weren't sidewalks and maybe other things tax dollars pay for. The area was dense and fairly low-income. Most of my friends in the neighborhood had either immigrated from other countries or were first generation. Growing-up hearing their accents and learning about their sociocultural backgrounds allowed me to gather some degree of cultural competency and appreciate what ELLs experience in public school.

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My mom liked to talk about words; she enjoyed pointing out the root word in a longer word to help me understand the meaning. If I didn't recognize a word like anthropology, she might break it down for me, opening-up a discussion about how the root, anthro, always refers to human beings. This helped me acquire vocabulary, unpack meaning and to note semantically related language patterns.

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While no one in my family is a professional writer, both my mom and dad modeled the practice of writing as a form of thinking and remembering. They both made books that were receptacles of internal dialogues, thoughts,  images, photos, quotes and musings. I have continued this diaristic practice, writing in books and keeping travel journals. My use of language continues to grow and expand as I explore my practice of writing almost every day.

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Xilu is the 9-year old daughter of some of our friends from Mexico. She hears Spanish spoken at home but prefers to speak in English. She attends a Spanish-language immersion school and recently showed me how dual language/bilingual education helps build a child's confidence and self worth. Xilu was proud when she translated the questions a food cart worker was asking me in Spanish but I couldn't understand, even though I've spent years in Spanish classes in high school and in college.

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My parents loved The Beatles and also loved to sing. As a preadolescent, I remember my dad taking me to see the animated film, Yellow Submarine. I was mortified when he and everyone else in the theater sang along to All You Need is Love, Yellow Submarine and other songs from the film. Despite my temporary embarrassment, I still remember all the words to those songs. When set to music, language bonds deeply in the mind.

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I was an only child until the age of 7 and spent a lot of time around adults who didn't talk down to me. I acquired language and expanded my vocabulary with zeal, especially as I'd receive praise when I expressed complicated concepts or used "sophisticated" words.

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Creating this book has provided a space to unpack how I learned the English language, a process I took for granted and gave  little thought to until now. It's become clear to me that acquiring language happened slowly and organically in my life, over many years, and that it was a pretty privileged experience overall. Growing-up in a native English speaking home, and having my home language reflected and reinforced all around me –in school, in public, in the media– made it possible to absorb the content and language objectives in school with far fewer roadblocks than I'd have had as an ELL student. That said, I find it unfortunate that I wasn't challenged to learn a second language through an immersive experience like the ELLs I refer to in this book: Grandpa Harry, Lisa, Xilu, and my many immigrant and first-generation friends growing-up in the diverse suburbs of Chicago.
Considering their experiences, I'm aware of the tremendous pressure placed on ELLs to assimilate and the potential loss of their cultural identities that are the result of that process as they birth new cultural identities for themselves. I've always been interested in the sociocultural backgrounds of people I'm around. This is a practice I'll want to grow as a teacher: learning about each student is essential in helping foment social and academic success for each different learner with their individual backgrounds and specific needs.
Along those lines, I'll want to further my knowledge of language so I can understand what my students are experiencing as they learn both my content objectives and larger language objectives. As I struggled to learn Spanish and ultimately found the process ineffective, I'll consider how learning English is happening as my students are in my art classes. Looking back at my acquisition of English, I see how it happened in all different subject areas and in multiple ways: watching TV, playing games, singing songs, inventing repetitive chants, and, most importantly, through organic social interactions. Thinking linguistically will help move me closer to my goal of creating the most equitable and inclusive classroom I can.